#oneaday Day 844: Hope was Kept Alive

So, it was a somewhat tense finish, but the impressive-looking Republique from Camouflaj (a developer that includes, among others, one of the creative minds behind Halo and Metal Gear Solid) is fully funded. The outcome was by no means looking certain, but a last-minute push saw the team sail past their $500,000 goal to over $550,000 with, at the time of writing, 14 minutes to go.

Why the hesitation, though, when projects like Wasteland 2 and Double Fine Adventure breezed through the crowdfunding process?

Part of the issue centres around the very thing that Republique is trying to do: bring a “triple-A” gaming experience to the iOS platform. Not in the form of a crippled console port with awful touchscreen controls, not in the form of a spinoff game with awful touchscreen controls, but a brand new game specifically designed for smartphones.

When Republique’s Kickstarter launched, the plan appeared to be to release the title only on iOS. (This angered the Android fans, but that’s a whole other issue.) It sounded like the thing people have been clamouring for for all this time — “bring us proper games on iOS,” they bellowed. “We’re sick of this 69p physics puzzle crap!” — but when it came to time for people to actually speak with their wallets, no-one wanted to cast the first dollar.

Whether this was people suddenly deciding that actually, they didn’t really want to play a triple-A iOS game after all, or simply waiting to see if that guy over there was going to chip in some money before they did, we’ll never know. But it certainly got off to a slow start despite considerable enthusiasm from its backers, its producers and the press — not to mention the fact that backing something on Kickstarter is essentially risk-free. If the project doesn’t meet its target, you don’t pay. Simple as that. You’d think that would make people a bit more willing to show a bit of faith in it.

After a little while, Camouflaj announced that the game would be coming to PC and Mac as well. They assure us that the desktop versions won’t just be straight ports of the iOS version and vice-versa, but naturally this made backers wonder if it’s taking away from the original point of the project. (I say it’s a good thing, since it means more people will be able to play the game, even if it somewhat dilutes the original message.)

Still the project struggled, however. The team brought in PR pro Billy Berghammer to help muster up some further enthusiasm for the title. Backers, developers and press alike continued to promote the project — in some cases drawing the ire of the community, such as when Garnett Lee mentioned it on the Weekend Confirmed podcast. But still it was looking questionable as to whether or not this promising-looking game would ever get made. (I had a sneaking suspicion that after all the community and press attention it would have got made anyway even if the Kickstarter had failed, but I guess we’ll never know now.)

As that big countdown on the Kickstarter page ticked inexorably down, people were worried. Would this promising project make it? Or would it forever be stillborn, The Game That Never Was?

The final hours came, and those jazzed about the game went into overdrive, bombarding social media with exhortations for those who thought the game looked interesting to back it, to show that they were hungry for this type of experience. As time counted down, it looked like something wonderful was happening. The phoenix was rising from the ashes, and that “amount pledged” counter was growing, faster and faster. By the time there were just a few hours left, the team was within $100,000 of its goal. As the deadline got closer and closer, the number crept higher and higher. Existing backers tweaked their pledges upwards to help push it over the edge until eventually, finally, with the hammer falling, the project lurched across the finishing line — and kept going.

It called to mind the way popular eBay auctions typically end up going. Actually, the way pretty much any eBay auction tends to end up going, in my experience. Nothing, nothing, nothing for days, a flurry of activity towards the end then a few “snipers” pushing it yet higher at the last minute. On eBay, this behaviour is at least understandable because bid-sniping is a proven (if immensely irritating) tactic for securing the thing you want. On Kickstarter, there’s no good reason for it to happen, short of people who had been intending to back the project for some time and hadn’t got around to it suddenly going “OH SHI~” and racing to their computers brandishing their credit cards.

Perhaps one explanation is that some prospective backers — let’s call them “floating backers” — have their eyes on several Kickstarters at once, and as they count down towards redemption or oblivion, they pick whichever one looks the most promising and/or likely to be successful, then jump on board with that one. Why? For the swag, of course. Ain’t no point putting up your money if you don’t get no cool shit for it, eh? And you wouldn’t want to inadvertently find yourself paying for ten projects that all got successfully funded, would you? So naturally you wait until the eleventh hour, pick the one with the coolest swag and then back the shit out of it before time expires. That way you get to come out of it looking like the hero — “I helped Republique over the finish line!” — and back a project you genuinely like the sound of in the process.

This is all conjecture, of course. Short of polling the entire community of over 11,000 backers for Republique, it’s impossible to know exactly why things unfolded the way they did. I find myself happy for the team that the game has been successfully funded, and I’m looking forward to playing it — but I find myself skeptical as to whether or not this game is, in fact, going to herald a revolution in “triple-A” iOS titles.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see!